Yes, content farms will be able to produce low-value content even more cheaply. Any “writer” who leans too hard on ChatGPT will find themselves producing material that feels indistinguishable from all the other low-value crap that floods the internet.

> You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they read from somewhere else.

I don't understand the vitriol HN has for professional writers and anyone who might work in gasp marketing.

Replace "writers" with "programmers" and your statement is still true but you don't hear it being shouted from the rooftops on every post about programming on HN.

>I don't understand the vitriol HN has for professional writers and anyone who might work in gasp marketing.

Let's say we'd be better off without anyone working in, gasp, marketing. Companies might sell less, but society would be much better of.

Go build it. See how many people discover yourGitHub repository without so much as a coherent explanation of what problem your code solves. (And, yes, that's marketing.)

If I had a nickel for every website I opened up and then closed because after 5 minutes I had no idea what the company or product did or why I should care, I'd be rich. Might be something really clever. Dunno. I just know it's 5 minutes of my life I'm not getting back because some techie thought their genius would be obvious to all.

>Go build it. See how many people discover yourGitHub repository without so much as a coherent explanation of what problem your code solves. (And, yes, that's marketing.)

Only in a pedantic sense. We could live with non-commercial marketing, if you want to call it that, without an advertising budget, ads, sponsored articles, and other such BS - like, say, the author promoting their FOSS on their blog. Or crafting a nice looking page with an enticing description.

As for commercial companies not being able to sell their products in that case, the world's smallest violin plays a heart-felt tune for them...

It's by no means pedantic. A lot of companies don't do a lot of advertising or sponsored articles but do spend a huge amount of money on informational articles (i.e. content marketing), trade show booths and paying employees who have talks accepted there to attend, developer days, webinars, meetups, other forms of engagement with developers and other users, etc. (And coherent copy on the website which sure doesn't come for free--which is also marketing.)

How would they sell at all?

Or is this one of those situations where you ignore the marketing you do like when painting with the broad brush of marketing=bad.

>How would they sell at all?

They wouldn't unless the product was needed and worth it enough to stand on its own via word of mouth and reputation. That's the main benefit.

What do you think word of mouth and reputation are other than forms of marketing?

Because regular honest word of mouth are not what people refer to as marketing, and have been a thing since before marketing was a career.

A marketeer might want to stir up "word of mouth" or build a product's reputation artificially. But I refer to good ole organic word of mouth and reputation built without marketing.

You know, just by buyers recommending it to other buyers, and the product getting recommended because the see it's good by itself. The way those things are normally understood, just like how "love" normally is understood as two persons taking a liking to one another, and not e.g. as in some guy stopping his car in a shady end of the city and paying $50 dollars in exchange for sex.

Last thing that I’ll add is that you seem to be quite active on this site - which is a marketing campaign for a VC firm.

You can keep moving the goalposts of what true marketing is though.

>Last thing that I’ll add is that you seem to be quite active on this site - which is a marketing campaign for a VC firm

Oh, an ad hominem! Nice. I could also work at marketing and hate marketing, doesn't change the point. And of course, I like HN despite it being a "marketing tool", not because of it. The "marketing campaign for YC" part is one of the main things I dislike about it. And the question wasn't whether marketing could ever produce something cool, but If it was that, I could add that I like some funny TV ads too.

>You can keep moving the goalposts of what true marketing is though

Really? As if differentating because some FOSS team making a cool site and promoting their project on some forums, for example, and corporate marketing, with a budget, a marketing department, ads, astroturfing, and all that, is impossible, right? "It's all marketing"

You can apply the same logic and expand your take to the point where almost everything non essential is included.

I don’t think it’s useful to look at the world that way. And I say that as someone who absolutely despise marketing and advertising.

This is petty argument -- there are more writers than programmers and then there is context of the situation where we are talking about a writing.

I grew up in a culture and with an idea that there is no bad book -- trust me, I wasted years chasing some bad ideas from shallow content. So, the Bullshit vendors earned my vitriol.

> This is petty argument

People in glass houses...

> trust me, I wasted years chasing some bad ideas from shallow content

Fool me once and all...

The mighty defender of professional writers does not use complete sentences. In his defense, he was always a bullshit vendor.

> but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps

My favorite book genre is roughly “Academic writes popular book after 20 years of researching a topic”. That will be very hard to replace with ChatGPT.

Someone like Gladwell though … yeah I can see LLMs being scary for that genre. Not quite yet, but soon.

Gladwell's strength is that he's an incredible storyteller. It will be a while before an LLM gets to that level.

You are right. The stories are fantastic and he really makes the underlying research shine. I can see LLM + Human working great for that kind of writing.

LLM writes the first draft, human makes it sing.

Well, Gladwell constructs great stories out of a very selective reading of research. Not that many writers don't do this to some degree, but Gladwell in his more recent career has been widely criticized for picking specific research and constructing a compelling narrative from it as opposed to telling a more nuanced tale.